RIALTO -- Rodney King, the black motorist whose 1991 videotaped beating by Los Angeles police officers led to riots a year later in South Central L.A., was declared dead early Sunday after being pulled from the bottom of his home's backyard swimming pool.

Rialto police received a call at 5:25 a.m. from King's fiancee in the 1000 block of East Jackson Street. Officers arrived and pulled him out of the pool. He was pronounced dead at Arrowhead Regional Medical Center in Colton at 6:11 a.m.

"As of right now, there's no update as to whether or not Mr. King was under the influence of any controlled substances or alcoholic beverages," said Rialto police Capt. Randy DeAnda, "and we won't know that until toxicology is performed by the San Bernardino County Coroner's Office."

He said he did not see any alcohol containers or drugs by the pool. And there were no obvious signs of foul play or trauma.

DeAnda said he had to notify King's fiancee of his death. She thought he had survived.

King's fiancee described King as an avid swimmer, and she had been talking to him into the wee hours.

"We don't know the exact amount of time he was in the pool," said DeAnda, "but his fiancee said she did have a conversation with him, she went back inside and then heard a splash."

It wasn't uncommon for King to spend time in the pool until very late at night, he said.

Members of King's family, along with a handful of media agencies, gathered in front of the home as news spread of his death.

Cory Hudson, 48, who identified himself as a cousin, said he heard about it on the news and had been trying to reach King's brother without success.

"It's just so sad. I feel bad for all the family members. He was just getting his life really together," Hudson said.

The 1992 Los Angeles riots, which were set off by the acquittals of the officers who beat King, lasted three days and left 55 people dead, more than 2,000 injured and swaths of Los Angeles on fire. At the height of the violence, King pleaded on television: "Can we all get along?"

King, then a 25-year-old on parole from a robbery conviction, was stopped for speeding on a darkened street on March 3, 1991. He was on parole and had been drinking - he later said it led him to try to evade police.

Four white Los Angeles police officers hit him more than 50 times with their batons, kicked him and shot him with stun guns.

A man who had quietly stepped outside his home to observe the commotion videotaped most of it and turned a copy over to a TV station. It was played over and over for the following year, inflaming racial tensions across the country.

It seemed the videotape would be the key evidence to a guilty verdict against the officers, whose trial was moved to the predominantly white suburb of Simi Valley. Instead, on April 29, 1992, a jury with no black members acquitted three of the officers on state charges in the beating; a mistrial was declared for a fourth.

Violence erupted immediately, starting in South Los Angeles.

Police, seemingly caught off-guard, were quickly outnumbered by rioters and retreated. As the uprising spread to the city's Koreatown area, shop owners armed themselves and engaged in running gun battles with looters.

King, in his recently published memoir, "The Riot Within: My Journey from Rebellion to Redemption," said FBI agents warned him a riot was expected if the officers were acquitted, and urged him to keep a low profile so as not to inflame passions.

The four officers who beat King - Stacey Koon, Theodore Briseno, Timothy Wind and Laurence Powell - were indicted in the summer of 1992 on federal civil rights charges. Koon and Powell were convicted and sentenced to two years in prison, and King was awarded $3.8 million in damages.

Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates, who had been hailed as an innovator in the national law enforcement community, came under intense criticism from city officials who said officers were slow to respond to the riots. He resigned under pressure soon after. Gates died of cancer in 2010.

In the two decades after he became the central figure in the riots, King was arrested several times, mostly for alcohol-related crimes.

In an interview earlier this year with The Associated Press, King said he was a happy man.

"America's been good to me after I paid the price and stayed alive through it all," he says. "This part of my life is the easy part now."

The Rev. Al Sharpton said in a statement that King was a symbol of the civil and anti-police brutality movement.

"Through all that he had gone through with his beating and his personal demons he was never one to not call for reconciliation and for people to overcome and forgive," Sharpton wrote. "History will record that it was Rodney King's beating and his actions that made America deal with the excessive misconduct of law enforcement."

Attorney Harland Braun, who represented one of the police officers, Ted Briseno, in the federal trial, said King's name would always be a part of Los Angeles history.

"I always saw him as a sad figure swept up into something bigger than he was," Braun said. "He wasn't a hero or a villain. He was probably just a nice person."

King's case never would have become such a symbol without the video, he said.

"If there hadn't been a video there would have never been a case. In those days, you might have claimed excessive force but there would have been no way to prove it." The Associated Press and staff writers Melissa Pinion-Whitt and Ryan Hagen contributed to this report.